"The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People donít realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior," says Valve's Gabe Newell as quoted on AllThingsD. "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. Itís a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think weíll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If thatís true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality." Thanks VG247.

Endo wrote on Jul 26, 2012, 13:08:With ME it's pretty simple actually. If you bought a new PC that came with ME preloaded you actually had pretty good odds of never having trouble with the OS. But God forbid you try installing it on some other system. In that case you were virtually guaranteed to have no end of trouble.

I don't know, the common advice back then was to downgrade to Windows 98 if you got a PC with ME installed. That's what I did for clients after getting so many Windows ME calls that I could recognize a dozen of its many BSOD dumps. It was notoriously buggy, it had problems both complex (exploitable stack) and simple (large file transfers could literally BSOD it). In addition to be worthless, it's own file restore functionality would continue running frequently after being disabled and so virus authors would dump their code into there. It had severe compatibility problems with many programs. It was just a buggy operating system, a half baked stop-gap that even Microsoft has long regretted.

It's amusing because Vista had many issues but few were anywhere near as severe as Windows ME. Unlike ME, most of Vista's problems were related to drivers. Nvidia and HP were notoriously shitty back then, Nvidia alone caused something 20% of all BSODs Microsoft had projected internally (to be fair though Microsoft often "certified" these). It's a big part of the reason the entire driver model was revisited again for Windows 7.

My first impression of Vista will long be remembered. I was given a laptop to get ready for one of the owners of the company. I turned it on, went through initial setup, and the damn thing BSOD'd on me on the first proper boot up.

Turns out it was the cd burner drivers (which were actually xp drivers but shoved into Vista) but I'll never forget that a new, fresh-out-of-the-box laptop with vista on it blue screened reliably on startup.

That summed up my entire view and experience with Vista. We went back to XP, and I'm retiring the last XP box out of our company tomorrow.